Important Wedding

In front of the Concert Hall in Stockholm, Sweden, stands a 24-ft. figure of Orpheus, demigod of Music, sinewy and poised in bronze, with his great lyre lifted and one hand just sprung from the strings. In a circle of fountains below him eight listeners, wakened from death, turn outward and upward toward the music.

In front of the Union Station in St. Louis, U.S.A., is a large and undistinguished plaza cleared in 1931 and named after the late Alderman Louis P. Aloe. To St. Louis swelterers for seven summers Aloe Plaza has offered no refreshment beyond the discouraged tentage of a few trees.

The famed Orpheus fountain in Stockholm was finished in 1936 by Carl Emil Andersson Milles, Sweden's greatest living sculptor. In 1931, in his third year as resident sculptor at Detroit's suburban Cranbrook Academy, Sculptor Milles met Alderman Aloe's widow in St. Louis and learned her desire for a group of fountains in Aloe Plaza. In 1936 Mrs. Aloe put up $12,500, the city of St. Louis put up $47,500, and Sculptor Milles was commissioned to do for St. Louis what he had done for Stockholm.

Last year, while grey-haired Carl Milles worked serenely in his three Cranbrook studios, pictures of his first clay models for the Wedding of the Mississippi and the Missouri were published in LIFE. Francis D. Healy, elderly chairman of St. Louis's Municipal Art Commission, saw them and snorted that the fountain would be better named "Wedding in a Nudist Colony" (TIME, Aug. 9). For Sculptor Milles' wave-naked Tritons, Commissioner Hubert Hoeflinger, onetime tailor, suggested trousers. Finally the Star-Times took a poll of public opinion, found plenty of people who agreed with the two indignant commissioners about "art" which had no fully-dressed pioneers or Indians in it, only some foreign-looking nudes and inappropriate deep-sea fishes.

To all this soft-spoken Carl Milles responded: "I am certain that they will love the finished fountain." Somewhat forgotten amid the publicity was the fact that Milles possesses not only the most invigorating fancy now at work in sculpture but an unsurpassed gift for making a powerful, rhythmic composition of many sculptured figures. In his Wedding the strong male figure of the Mississippi and the aloof female Missouri, mounted on swooping fishes, will approach each other in the centre of Aloe Plaza. Behind each lollops a flowing train of antic naiads and tough river gods. To Detroit last week to see the final, full-size models of these Rivers, journeyed St. Louis' seven-man Art Commission.

Not won to the point of love, Commissioners Healy and Hoeflinger were mollified enough to join in a unanimous approval, though "feeling that some modification . . . would be desirable." Said Sculptor Milles: "A fountain should be a gay and happy thing. . . . They ask me why there are sharks in the fountain, when there are no sharks in the Mississippi and I reply that this is an important wedding and the guests have come from far off."

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